Comments on: Improving SEO: webpage names and titles

By: Kez

Kez — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:40:26 +0000

The problem with metadata is that it’s not used anymore. Too many people kept trying to put stuff in there that had nothing to do with their sites, so search engines ignore it, except for displaying your description if you have one. I still recommend people use it, especially if they’re displaying context-based advertisers which just read the code on the page, but I also recommend “subtle,” as you said, page titles.

For example, instead of “Archive” what about “Archive for the Fantasy Epic War of Winds”?

It’s descriptive, but also gets across the right points. I’m with you though. Obvious “OMG GOOGLE LOVE ME” page titles are hella annoying!

By: Sen

Sen — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 03:55:47 +0000

It really annoys me when certain kinds of websites have a dump of words in their title. I always thought the word-dump was better left in the keywords metadata. Neither of my comics have very descriptive titles to that end (Millennium includes that it’s a fantasy adventure online comic by me, which is good enough; LF just has its tagline… luckily it’s the 3rd Google result when you search its name now, lol). For comics and comic-related sites, I like it that way. SEO and subtlety, it’s hard to do.

By: Winged Wolf Studio − Does Webcomic SEO work?

Winged Wolf Studio − Does Webcomic SEO work? — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 04:54:05 +0000

[...] descriptions (even though these are now ignored by search engines, grr!), more text with keywords, webpage titles, the whole shebang. If you look on my front page, all the text is readable by search engines. Check [...]

By: Bengo

Bengo — Sat, 15 Nov 2008 05:41:39 +0000

This is slightly off topic but related: As early as possibly in the creation of a web-bound comic, search the title you plan to use to see what else is competing for it. You might find yourself rethinking your choice.

For example, my two comics: LilNyet.com has virtually no competition, as you would expect, but ScratchinPostComics.com has comics in the name because Scratchin Post was already taken by a blog. I didn’t know KEZ’s advice about hyphens or I would have hyphenated the word comics so it was searchable.

I keep track of a list of thousands of comics, and I have become sensitized to which names are promising and which are a kiss of death. Any name can work if the comic is outstanding, but a bad name makes life harder. Also, I know in my head lots of sites which are .com or .net but most people do not.

Browsers keep track of names pretty well so that you only have to enter a few letters, but certain words, like comic and webcomic, require the whole word plus and extra letter.

If I was starting a title now, I would take KEZ’s advice on a descriptive title but I would also have a standard domain name that forwarded to my site:

Guinea-Pig-Warriors-rodents-battling-to-save-Rodentia-most-awesome-teeth

and

GuineaPigWarriors.com

Of course, when talking only about inside pages, this issue is moot.